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Comment by unityByFreedom | Hacker News Reader

Hold on, who is behind https://archiveteam.org?

Folks, careful what extensions you add.

Archive Team is probably one of the most reputable organisations on the internet at this point. Being careful is great, but when you yourself linked to a page that provides an extraordinary amount of information explaining exactly who they are and what they're doing (plus the source code to prove it!), it comes across as fearmongering.

oh no he's onto us boys

The "who we are" link on that page answers your questions.

I'm not questioning this particular site, but if you're unfamiliar with a project, trusting a "who we are" link is just about the worst way to verify it. You're bound to be p4wn3d. Anyone can claim to be anyone.

Personally, I'd look for a link from e.g. eff.org, or a similar trusted site.

Why should you trust me? I'm Larry Page. Why should you trust that I'm Larry Page? Simple. Look at the "Who am I" part of this post.

Who am I: Larry Page, obviously.

As a footnote, I'd never run something like this on my computer, but if it's just IPs you want, an RPi image would get you my IP.

I don't think I've ever seen a webpage that claims to be owned by someone other than the real owner, aside from typosquat phishing sites.

I reckon scam sites pretending to be reputable newspapers and mimicking their layout and contents to push investment scams via social media ads should qualify.

And heck, any and all phishing sites, by definition.

So millions of websites?

Exactly. This "group" is run by one person and an above comment claims it's one of the most reputable tech organizations. I think not since I've never heard of them and I've read tech news daily for the last two decades. I can't think of why someone would try to tell a techie that a certain unknown tech org is reputable unless they were advertising for it.

> I think not since I've never heard of them and I've read tech news daily for the last two decades.

That's weird, because they seem to have quite a lot of coverage in major tech news sites:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/In_The_Media

They've been around for over a decade and every time a service shuts down and pulls their content there's always a mention of ArchiveTeam trying to coordinate an archive (negotiating end dates, any limiting or throttling with backup, asking for help). I've used them a bunch of times over the years when I see a thread like this. Just search this forum and you'll see them pop up for things like: imdb forums, coursera courses, soundcloud, tumblr's nsfw content, friendster, google reader archives.

This just suggests to me you've not paid attention to news reports around big services shutting down, as Archive Team gets brought up regularly in those instances.

Nothing wrong with that, and asking the question is fair enough, but doubling down on it in the face of being given references to who they are that are easy to verify gets a bit tiresome.

Especially since this is a group prominent enough to have a brief but well cited Wikipedia page [1] with references to media appearances in Wired, The Register, PC World, Technology Review, OnTheMedia, Techdirt, BBC, RadioNZ, CBC, New Scientist and others.

You can also find Jason Scott on HN [2], and his comments will point you to a number of other HN threads discussing archival, some of which are relevant to Archive Team.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textfiles

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001513491-Save...

They point to the Archive Team in point 4

I wonder why team.archive.org wasn't used.

It isn't an extension, it's a VM image. Unless you believe they possess and are publicly distributing an unpatched VM breakout the worst it can do is maliciously use your internet connection.

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